Sunday, September 13, 2009

Road Trip Photos

Last week Jeri and I took a mini road trip to Napa Valley in California's Central Coast. We took the Pacific Coast Highway and the 101 Freeway. Along the way we stopped at Santa Barbara, Solvang, San Simeon, Big Sur, Monterry and Aptos. We went through San Francisco but did not stop. These are just a few of the photos that we took. I'll be posting more during the week.

2 comments:

Wow, Randy, the picture of Big Creek Bridge brings back an intense memory. Back in the early 70's, my girlfriend and I hitch hiked from Detroit, to Estes Park, to LA to Frisco and back. We left with $135 and returned with some of that. There was fun, amazement and danger all along the way. We stood at the the highest point of the Continental Divide (14,443ft), road in the back seat of a Mercedes, from Colorado Springs, to Malibu, with the guys who had stolen the car and pitched a tent at the bottom of that cliff in the picture of the Big Creek Bridge in Big Sur...exactly as shown in that picture.

We had just had lunch at Nepenthe in Big Sur and caught a ride up the coast to that bridge. We climbed down and decided to stay there for the night. We didn't give a thought to the possibility of an in-coming tide!. In a grotto in those rocks, we found some young guy who was living there. Amazing.

Well, my girlfriend got something in her eye and I couldn't find it, so we left everything, climbed back up the cliff and hitched back to a free clinic that we had passed earlier. The doctor got it out and we put out our thumbs, hoping to get back to our worldly possessions. A VW passed us, stopped and backed-up. We got into Paula's Bug and she took us to back to the bridge. When she saw where we had set up our tent, she told us that we couldn't stay there: people were found with their heads 10 feet from their bodies down there. She insisted that we climb down...get our stuff...and that we come to stay with her for the weekend. I imagine that you can imagine the things going through our heads half way up that cliff, but when we made it, she was standing there, smoking a doobie and asked us if we thought she would still be there or not. Turns out that she had this great brownstone facing the Golden Gate Bridge, where she prepared a beautiful dinner for us. We talked for a while before she said that she had to leave for the night, but that we were free to stay. Before she left, she brought out a huge bowl full of sea shells and asked us to pick one to remember our time with her. I picked a perfect nacre nautilus, which I still have. She dropped a pound of weed on the dining room table an left. We never saw her again. We were too stoned to even think of asking for her number or address.

I guess in one way or another, this kind of thing still happens to people. In one way or another, I try to make sure that it does.

Ridge ol' buddy, thanks for reading. That sound like quite a time. It sounds like chapter in a book I hope to read by you some day. You took chances didn't you. I admire that.

It had been twenty years almost to the day since jeri and I have crossed that bridge into Big Sur. We had our kids with us that time. It's funny but we took off to get away from it all and spent the whole time talking about the kids. Time goes by too fast. The trip reminded us of just how fast.